I have always thought that there current policy is bs. Did they broadcast the show Primeval??? I watched it here in Boston, it had gone through many transcodes by the time it finally reached me and it look great, no better or worse than any other show. Shot on S16. In the age of YouTube, where there are so many formats being thrown into the mix, their argument about qc doesn't hold water.

I assume it would cover HD productions commissioned by the BBC. Since BBC Films could be involved with funding these director's feature films they may have to meet HD technical requirements and also BBC dramas, many of which are produced by Independent production companies, but commissioned by the beeb.

I suspect they'd have to also get EBU approval because Channel 4 and ITV also have similar HD requirements.

Feature films are a buy in, so I guess they do it on a case by case basis if a Super 16 feature would be broadcast on a HD channel. Last time I saw "Hurt Locker" on TV it was on a standard def channel. Super 16 programmes are still transmitted on the BBC's standard def channels.

I think there's massively more being read into this than is really there.

It is quite difficult to make 16mm produce good HD content. It's extremely easy to make even 35mm produce iffy HD content that's very difficult to compress. Film is extremely expensive (extremely expensive).

I'm aware that Occam is widely misused, but overlooking basic facts like these in favour of some sort of grand conspiracy is paranoia.

I remember hearing about this years ago and the reason back then was that the broadcast encoders weren't mature enough to handle grain in an aesthetic manner without the whole picture falling into macroblocking artifacts.

Film grain is noise, potentially quite a lot of noise - often an amount of noise that we wouldn't even think about accepting from a newly designed system. Much as I would be the first to point out that broadcast video frequently suffers horrible bandwidth restriction at the hands of commercially-minded producers, it's difficult to criticise the technology because it struggles to deal with what is, in an engineering sense, nothing more than a very noisy signal.

but the "noise" can be scrubbed out. There are several tools that do an incredible job at it. It is done to loads of digital footage all the time. They are so good at their job that people think that it isn't film sometimes, myself included. Said scrubbed footage has been put through all manner of compression and decompression and it looks fantastic. Truth be told, a producer could lie about it and get away with it. The technical spec argument is still a very thin one. Sounds similar to the argument people make against railroads, at least in the US, less about fact and more about financial gain. But then there is the case where a producer wants grain or noise, what do they do then? Sorry sir, it MUST be clean and smooth, if not, no HD for you.

They're not just BBC HD rules, the Super 16 rule applies to top tier HD Discovery programmes. Unfortunately, in the world of HD Super 16 is regarded as a standard def format, which is a shame because it does have a look of its own. They might have accepted it for 720, but for their flagship 1080 channels gloss seems to be the desired look.